Abstract:
Early robots often occupied tightly controlled environments, e.g., factory floors, designed to segregate robots and humans for safety. Today robots "live" with humans, providing a variety of services at homes, in workplaces, or on the road. To become effective and trustworthy partners, robots must understand human intentions and act accordingly in response. One core challenge here is the inherent uncertainty in understanding intentions, as a result of the complexity and diversity of human actions. Robots must hedge against such uncertainties in order to achieve robust performance and sometimes actively elicit information in order to reduce uncertainty and ascertain human intentions. In this talk, we will explore planning and learning under uncertainty for human-robot interactive or collaborative tasks. I will discuss our recent work, covering mathematical models for human intentions, planning algorithms that connect robot perception with decision making, and learning algorithms that enable robots to adapt to human preferences. The discussion, I hope, will spur greater interest towards principled approaches that integrate perception, planning, and learning for fluid human-robot collaboration.

Prof. David Hsu
School of Computing
National University of Singapore
Singapore, 117417
Republic of Singapore

Biography:
David Hsu is a professor of computer science at the National University of Singapore, a member of NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences & Engineering, and deputy director of the Advanced Robotics Center. His current research focuses on robotics and AI. He received Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, USA. After leaving Stanford, he worked at Compaq Computer Corp.'s Cambridge Research Laboratory and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the National University of Singapore, he held the Sung Kah Kay Assistant Professorship and was a Fellow of the Singapore-MIT Alliance. He recently served as the general co-chair of IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation 2016 and the general chair of Robotics: Science & Systems 2016. He and his team of colleagues and students won the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge Award at the International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) 2015 and the RoboCup Best Paper Award at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems (IROS) 2015.